At comScore, we are constantly mining our vast mountain of data and surfacing interesting new findings that we don’t always get the opportunity to share publicly. So today we are introducing a new website, the comScore Data Mine. This site is our way of bringing more insights to you by regularly publishing new “data gems,” which are colorful, bite-sized graphical representations of the best discoveries we unearth from our data.

Whether you’re a journalist, blogger, client, or just someone who loves data, we encourage you to use and share these data gems with others. Add a beautiful color chart to your story, spruce up your presentation, or share the findings with colleagues. We simply ask that you give comScore full attribution when you use the data gems. Please feel free to come back and browse the comScore Data Mine anytime, and if you’d like to see new data gems as soon as they’re published to the site, please subscribe to our RSS feed or follow comScore Data Gems on Twitter.

We hope you enjoy!

A very straightforward premise underlies the work we do as a mobile team at comScore: collect the best possible data about the dynamic mobile market and turn it into actionable insight that our clients can rely on to run their businesses.

But while our focus is simple, the mobile space we’re measuring is increasingly complex. It’s a landscape filled with multiple device platforms, competing content ecosystems based on both device technology platforms and operator networks, and emerging classes of devices such as tablets and eBook readers that further complicate what we think of as “mobile.”

Our approach to this complexity has been to thoughtfully measure the mobile market using an array of methodologies and data sources including a metered panel of Smartphones (Mobile Metrix), a sophisticated, multi-market online survey (MobiLens), and a census of mobile operator network traffic (GSMA Mobile Media Metrics).

This week we’re providing clients with an additional source of data as we debut mobile-optimized tagging for publishers.

While mobile page views to PC-optimized Web pages are currently included in the “Other” category as part of the Media Metrix Universe report, this new extension of our Unified Digital Measurement™ initiative provides a mobile-optimized tag designed to fully measure the traffic to mobile-optimized Web sites and applications. For example, while mobile traffic to www.nytimes.com is tracked by existing comScore tags, our mobile tags are designed for mobile-optimized sites such as m.nytimes.com or nytimes.mobi.

Our internal research has demonstrated that mobile platforms such as Android, iPhone, and RIM often elicit behavior very different than PCs and that there are even substantial differences between different versions of the same platform. Audience measurement support is uneven across devices and each platform handles cookies differently or doesn’t accept them at all. The comScore mobile tag was developed to capture traffic across the major smartphone platforms, hundreds of feature phones, and mobile devices including iOS, Android, RIM, Palm, Windows, and Symbian operating systems.

This granular measurement of the mobile Web will be complemented later this month when we debut application analytics for Apple, Android, and RIM platforms, which will take us yet another step closer to rounding out a more comprehensive picture of the mobile media landscape.

comScore’s mobile Web tagging is simple to implement and is available today at no cost to publishers worldwide. For more information, please contact your account representative. Not a client? For more information and to participate, please email mobiletaginfo@comscore.com.

When comScore publicly releases its September qSearch reporting this week, there will be a couple of important enhancements to highlight. The first change is that September will be the first month reflecting the impact of Google Instant, Google’s new feature that delivers results in real-time while users type their query. The second change will be the inclusion of added metrics around the U.S. explicit core searches “powered by” Google and Bing.

Google Instant Search Reporting
Google’s “Instant Search,” announced on September 8, 2010, alters the user search experience considerably. Prior to the introduction of Instant Search, a Google user typed in a search keyword or phrase, which dynamically generated a pick list of query suggestions designed to help the user select a query that best reflects his or her intent. The user would keep typing until she found an appropriate search suggestion or hit enter to submit the query she typed in the search box.

With Instant Search, the user is now additionally presented with a full results page that corresponds to the top ranked suggestion in the suggestion list. The page is dynamically updated as the user continues typing, which could potentially generate a large number of result pages that may or may not be of user interest. At the same time, the newly added detailed results provide the user with more information to formulate a satisfactory query and offer new modes of explicitly engaging with a result page. In particular, the user no longer has to hit enter to begin interacting with the result set on the screen.

Fortunately, the comScore panel provides visibility into all events that a user is conducting and all the HTTP calls associated with the user’s actions. Based on this insight, we have developed a priority scoring system that allows us to identify search results with explicit user action and interstitial results with a sufficiently long pause to suggest some level of implicit engagement. User actions that qualify an explicit query include those where a user hits “enter,” clicks on an algorithmic or sponsored result, clicks one of the various refinement links (such as past 24 hours, etc.) or clicks on a vertical search tab to execute the query in a different channel (such as News or Image Search). Any query with such explicit action is counted in Explicit Core Search. Query result pages without explicit user action, but with a pause of at least 3 seconds, are considered as indicating ‘implicit’ engagement and will count towards Total Core Search.

“Powered By” Reporting
Beginning this month, comScore will begin providing insight into the share of Explicit Core Searches that are powered by the two major providers of algorithmic search results – Google and Bing. Google’s “powered by” share is composed of searches conducted at Google entities, as well as searches on AOL and Ask’s MyWebSearch where Google branding is present. Bing’s “powered by” share is composed of searches conducted at Bing entities, as well as Yahoo! searches where Bing branding is present. This primarily consists of queries at Yahoo! Web Search, Yahoo! Image Search and Yahoo! Video Search. Some of Yahoo!’s in-channel searches, such as Movies or Finance, are still provided by Yahoo!

I recently attended the World Economic Forum (WEF) “Annual Meeting of the New Champions”, also known as the Summer Davos, in the northern port city of Tianjin, China. The three day WEF conference attracted some 1,500 high profile leaders, academics and business leaders from almost 90 countries. I was flattered to be among the invitees.

Back in 2007, comScore was honored to be named one of 47 Technology Pioneers by the WEF. To be selected as a Technology Pioneer, a company must be involved in the development of life-changing technology innovation and have the potential for long-term impact on business and society. In addition, it must demonstrate visionary leadership, show all the signs of being a long-standing market leader – and its technology must be proven. So, you can imagine how much I was looking forward to the meeting in Tianjin -- where comScore was named one of twelve companies described as ‘Global Growth Shapers’.

The theme of this year’s conference was “Driving Growth Through Sustainability”, which, in the words of the WEF, recognizes that achieving sustainability requires committing to a new mind set – one that is determined to challenge long-held economic assumptions, rethink business models and explore scientific and technological solutions to foster innovation and creativity within organizations. It is also a theme that highlights the role of the New Champions and calls upon us to embrace a new holistic systemic and integrated approach to sustainability, focusing on not only environmental but also economic and social impact.

There were four main pillars to the conference:

1. Improving competitiveness through science and technology
2. Creating new value from business models and for future markets
3. Facilitating economic and social change
4. Designing effective global, industry and regional solutions

I was particularly interested in the fourth pillar because it meshed with one of comScore’s strategic imperatives: global expansion. comScore now offers services in 43 individual countries, so I wanted to absorb any and all information about global trends.

Just prior to the start of the conference, the WEF published its “Global Competitiveness Report 2010-2011” (compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers), which is one of the world’s most respected assessments of national competitiveness, providing valuable insights to the policies, institutions, factors that enable robust economic development and long term prosperity and providing a unique benchmarking tool for policy makers and businesses.
I thought you would be interested in seeing some of the data contained in the report, so I’ve assembled some of the more interesting slides below. Note the much higher future economic growth that is expected in emerging countries but also the required need for these countries to install the infrastructure necessary to grow the consumer consumption portion of their GDP.

China’s Premier Wen Jiabao spoke at the conference and was particularly bullish on China’s prospects, saying that the surge in foreign investment demonstrated China’s continuing attraction to foreign investors and stressed Beijing would continue to “improve” laws and policies related to foreign enterprises. According to figures cited by Mr. Wen, more than 470 of the top 500 global corporations had established a presence in China. By July, China had received $1.05 trillion of foreign investment in cumulative terms, ranking first among developing countries for 18 consecutive years. In the first seven months of this year, foreign investment in China increased by 20.7% over the same period last year.

Mr. Wen added: “China’s economic growth has provided major development opportunities for multinationals and created huge demand for major economies and neighboring countries.” He said China would pursue and establish a long term mechanism to expand domestic consumption. Innovation, an upgrade of industrial infrastructure and advances in technology would lead to more sustainable development. The country’s economy certainly appears to be moving in the right direction and according to Justin Yifu Lin, chief economist of the World Bank, is predicted to grow by 9.5% this year! In comparison, the U.S. GDP grew by only 1.7% in the second quarter, marking the second consecutive quarter of decline as the effect of the government’s stimulus wears off and unemployment remains stubbornly high at 9.6%. It’s not a pretty picture.

comScore ARS recently released the results of years of research illustrating the relative importance of creative (vs. media) in driving ad-induced sales. comScore ARS has been in the business of ad copy-testing for 40 years, conducting extensive research for some of the world’s largest brands. Through this research, it has found that the quality of an ad’s creative is four times more impactful in influencing sales shifts than the media plan itself. More specifically, the study findings show that 52% of shifts in brand sales are attributable to the quality of creative – making creative far and away the single most impactful driver of sales change. For context, media planning elements like GRPs, wearout and continuity/flighting account for 13% of sales change while price, promotion, distribution and other factors account for the remaining 35%.

The implications of this finding cannot be overstated. Let’s compare TV to digital for a moment. This year, a :30 spot in the World Series will reportedly cost an advertiser $450,000. As is nearly always the case with large TV investments, a vast majority of these ads will go through rigorous pre-testing before they see the light of day. In fact, advertisers pre-test multiple strategies and executions to determine what resonates best with consumers and what will likely provide the strongest sales impact. To juxtapose that, in the digital space, a homepage takeover on a major portal can now cost upward of $1MM on a key date (and routinely above and beyond the $450,000 World Series investment). Sure enough, most of these ads are developed without any kind of pre-testing at all. The question is why?

The answer, I believe, is simple. Despite advertisers’ increasing investment in digital media, copy-testing is simply not yet an accepted discipline in digital. This primarily lies in the way digital ad effectiveness research has been historically funded. Unlike television pre-testing (which is funded and owned by the “client-side”), digital marketing effectiveness research has typically been carved out of media plan budgets. This is a result of three key factors:

1. Historically, a small proportion of total ad budgets have been allocated to digital. With a relatively minimal investment in digital, the importance of getting the creative “right” was simply not a high priority on the client-side.
2. The use of ad formats such as static banners has historically meant that production costs were low and so the cost of being wrong was minimal. As the use of rich media and video increases, so do production costs, which, in turn, means that the cost of not having an effective ad becomes material.
3. Because so much of digital advertising has been (and in many cases still is) transacted and evaluated in strictly quantitative terms (i.e. where impressions are bought and sold on exchanges and delivered through complex targeting algorithms), it can be easy to overlook the impact creative quality can have on the overall effectiveness of a campaign. Many digital creatives know this all too well.

The time has come, however, for the digital advertising community to recognize that creative matters and in a big way. Marketers can’t simply rely on accurate targeting - even at heavy weight levels - without simultaneously delivering a persuasive message. Gian Fulgoni, comScore’s Chairman, addressed this very topic in a recent blog post titled “Four Times Zero is Still Zero.”

Digital advertising formats are improving by the day, providing the canvas for excellent creative to take form. There are new and imaginative ways to integrate branding elements into the experience and develop high-impact creative. Recent announcements from several of the top web publishers promoting big, rich and interactive new ad formats serve as further proof of that evolution. The real question going forward will be, “Will the digital ad community leverage these powerful new branding mechanisms in a way that allows the art of the creative to play an equal or even leading role to the science behind the buy?”

There is no doubt that digital excels when it comes to media planning, and that the medium is inherently one of the most efficient delivery vehicles in the history of advertising. That side of the equation alone drives enormous value for many of the stakeholders in the ecosystem. But when one takes a step back and considers that creative quality is 4 times as important as key media planning elements in driving sales, it is easy to see that there is so much more value to be created – for advertisers, for publishers, and for everyone in between.

It’s time we shift our focus on creating this value. It’s time for digital advertising to get CREATIVE.

This post was originally published in AdvertisingAge on February 15, 2010. However, it is still very much relevant today for CPG marketers and retailers as the industry continues its slow but inexorable march to the Internet.

By any measure, sales of consumer package goods represent an enormous industry - convenience and club stores, supermarkets, supercenters and drug stores, macaroni, mouthwash, mustard and other daily necessities generate more than $1 trillion in annual sales.

So it's no surprise that, for years, the online-ad industry has eyed CPG giants' vast marketing budgets, knowing that shifting just a few percentage points of traditional-media spend would do wonders for its share. But here's an idea: If the internet really wants to take a bigger slice of the CPG ad pie, it should look beyond the tens of billions of TV advertising and focus on where the real money is spent: the trade and consumer-promotion budgets.

According to a recent SAP report, while manufacturers allocated 25% of their 2008 revenue to marketing, most of these dollars (78%) were actually spent on promotions, with media/TV accounting for a much lower 22%. Importantly, the vast majority (86%) of manufacturers' promotion spending took the form of trade deals -- which represented 17% of revenue.

Trade deals are the monies that manufacturers pay retailers in return for in-store displays, temporary price reductions and newspaper feature ads that communicate those price reductions. Supermarkets have used newspapers almost exclusively as the medium in which to advertise the week's special prices. When you consider that Sunday newspapers also account for about 90% of all cents-off coupons, print has been the medium of choice for the CPG industry. The use of TV has been mainly reserved for manufacturers' brand-building efforts.

Recently, however, I've been seeing some changes afoot. First, manufacturers are beginning to realize that the internet can be a powerful branding medium and are accelerating their testing and measurement of the ROI from online advertising.

On the promotion front, as cash-strapped consumers seek savings in every way possible, overall coupon redemption has increased for the first time in 14 years. More and more, retailers are using the internet as an efficient and secure distribution vehicle for manufacturer coupons.

comScore data show that almost 40 million people visited coupon sites in November, up more than 40% in the past two years. Individual sites such as Coupons.com (a high of 15 million monthly visitors in 2009), Eversave.com (7 million) and CoolSavings.com (5 million) have built substantial traffic.

Will supermarkets' websites be the place that consumers visit to obtain their coupons? Don't count on it. Traffic to supermarket sites has just not grown to meaningful levels. The leading supermarkets haven't been able to attract more than 1.5 million monthly visitors to their individual websites. It might well be that consumers have come to expect to view all of their options for discounts and coupons in one location.

Interestingly, in contrast to supermarkets, other channel retailers have been able to generate much higher website visitation levels. Walmart.com attracted 31.9 million monthly visitors; Target.com saw 29.5 million; Walgreens.com drew 6.3 million. Why the disparity? Well, for mass merchandisers, the main driver of traffic appears to be the appeal of non-grocery e-commerce.

For supermarkets, however, a compelling reason for consumers to visit their websites en masse has yet to materialize.

That means supermarkets need to "fish where the fish are," and some have begun offering their coupons on third-party sites that promise to attract higher levels of consumer traffic. Kroger and Safeway, for example, are integrating coupons with their loyalty cards, on their own sites and others such as ShortCuts.com (owned by AOL). Forget clipping coupons. Rather, you log on to the website with your loyalty card number and select your desired coupons; the savings are automatically loaded to your account and applied to your bill when you check out.

Retailers also need to understand how to distribute their information in line with how consumers use media. ShopLocal is digitizing retailers' localized price and product data and placing it not only on the retailers' own sites, but also on high traffic sites such as Yahoo. Other companies are busy placing price incentives in mobile phone apps, in shareable widgets for social communities and in out-of-home digital screens.

Looking to the future, retailers and manufacturers will have to recognize the declining audience for print newspapers as well as understand how they can better use some of the internet's inherent advantages. And media sellers will have to continue touting these messages. But the good news? The recession may well have accelerated the dawning of that day.

This post was originally published at SearchEngineWatch on October 11, 2010.

Universal search - or blended search - has been an integrated part of the search experience since 2007. Heralded at the time as a revolution for searchers and marketers alike, the ensuing popularity has led to virtually every search engine today delivering blended results.

What originally began as simple weather updates and celebrity image results has evolved into a plethora of blended results options slicing and dicing your results pages into rather helpful sections.

Type in [San Francisco] and you're met with local results, images, maps, news, weather and an endless number of other options outside of the standard destination links. Although you are casting a wide net with a search as broad as "San Francisco," the engines are doing their best to offer you every possible option on the first page of results.

While universal search has clearly been a revolution in delivering information, there is a legitimate question as to whether it "works," which of course depends on how you define that word.

The funny thing about these types of results is that these success metrics can be very different for searchers vs. marketers. Searchers type in [weather 10019] and get exactly what they need in the blended weather result at the top of the page. But a marketer, say in this case Weather.com, would prefer that the searcher click-through and visit their website so they can deliver ads against that audience and monetize their content.

On the other hand, if you type in [Avatar DVD], although you'll receive blended shopping/news/etc. results as a searcher, the real winners are the marketers that show up because they are getting what they want -- to advertise with images/video to the consumer, and potentially get a shopping click-through and subsequent conversion.

Not All Blended Results are Created Equal

Every search engine must strike a balance between pleasing their customers as well as their clients. What is that balance? Let's run the numbers on the Big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing).

In August, a full one-third of all searches performed contained at least one blended result on the SERP from the Big 3 search engines. Although we generally see a fluctuating number above and below 33 percent for Google and Yahoo, Bing stands out with more than 54 percent of their SERPs containing a blended result.

Consistent with Bing's value proposition as a "decision engine" as opposed to a search engine, they are pushing hard with some of their blended result innovations to try to capture a grander share of the marketplace.

Give the searchers good results and they will come back. Bing's blended result percentage has nearly doubled in the past year, so it would appear that blended results have been clear point of emphasis.

Clicks, We Don't Need No Stinkin' Clicks!

Strictly speaking, clicks are the simple definition of success between the searchers and the marketers when it comes to blended results. If a search engine can answer a question for a searcher without a click being needed, the searcher is satisfied in the fewest actions possible.

But the marketers want the clicks (and resulting customer store visits) as they will inevitably convert a certain percentage of the searchers.

Using this click-based criterion, which blended results are best for searchers and which are best for marketers?

Best for Searchers

The three types of blended result pages with the lowest click-through rates (CTRs) (and best searcher satisfaction) are:

• Stock quotes (66 percent CTR)
• Maps (73 percent CTR)
• Dictionary definitions/answers (80 percent CTR).

This intuitively makes sense, right? These three provide the precise information the searcher is looking for without requiring clicking through for additional information, thereby considerably driving down the CTR.

As for blended result pages with the highest CTRs, shopping dominates the space with a 127 percent CTR. (A CTR over 100 percent is easily achievable because searchers can run one search and click on multiple search results during that session -- i.e., comparison shop).

Local results rank second at 107 percent, but anytime a search engine determines shopping blended results are relevant to you, the overall CTR shoots through the roof.

Best for Marketers

Even more interesting is the relationship these shopping blended results have with their paid search counterparts.

The average paid CTR on any search engine result page is about 9 percent. But if the SERP shows blended shopping results, the paid CTR will jump to 27 percent!

Of course the engines have determined the search is shopping related, and shopping searches have higher paid CTRs, but it's enlightening nonetheless. A marketer's dream, indeed.

Video and SEO

According to search engine optimization (SEO) firm, RankAbove, search results with video thumbnails have a 41 percent higher CTR than plain text results. The best part: every SEO position benefits. Regardless of the average position, video search results have a considerably higher CTR than their equivalent text result.

This differential in CTR is especially stark the lower the position on the page, driving incredible value for you if you're stuck in the 9 or 10 position on Page 1. Merging video together with these results will exponentially increase your value by position.

The Moral of This Story

Searchers are more inclined to interact and engage with blended results than they are with text results. Different types of blended results drive different types of behaviors, but the value to the searcher vs. the marketer can be delineated prior to focusing your efforts.

Just remember to take into account how blended results can impact your search marketing and optimization efforts. The value isn't in just being seen, but being found.